Winning Moment: Sprint car veteran Mark Smith narrowly held off polesitter Paul Colagiovanni to win the $1,500 USCS sprint car feature at Hendry County Motorsports Park on Friday night (Feb. 3), the biggest race running in the state of Florida after the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series was rained out earlier in the day.
Dramatic Moment: Drake Troutman got just enough of a jump on the final restart of the Winternationals modified feature at East Bay to get ahead of Lucas Lee, pinching off his preferred line on the bottom side of the track and then using a high-side charge to take the checkered flag.
Only DIRTcar officials opted to make themselves the story, penalizing Troutman for allegedly “jumping the restart” and handing the win to Lee.
Easily the worst piece of officiating dirt racing has seen since the Chili Bowl.
In a Nutshell: Pretty much everything wrong with dirt racing came bubbling to the surface this Friday night.
What They’ll Be Group Chatting About This Morning
Troutman had every reason to be upset and pretty much at a loss for words when interviewed after Friday’s modified race at East Bay, because he was flat robbed of a race win. Yes, Troutman was using the fan out move on the high side all the way to the ragged edge, but it was Lee that chose the inside lane to start on, it was Lee that restarted the race and it was Lee that was leading the race at the stripe when the restart occurred.
Besides, and I will die on this hill, if a flagman/race director believes that someone jumped a restart, then the restart should not be considered valid. The race should be immediately yellow-flagged and the offending driver penalized. If a jump-the-start call requires multiple laps to make a determination, it wasn’t a clear enough violation to warrant the officials changing the finishing order of a race.
Arguably the biggest headline to hit dirt racing yesterday was Lincoln Speedway being the first track to actually dial back streaming coverage of its racing events, presumably in favor of better grandstand attendance.
Enter Screven Motor Speedway. Between overnight rainfall saturating the grounds, issues with track lighting and an overly bloated program of seven classes, pretty much every single issue that a race fan could run into that would discourage them from attending a race in person was on display in Georgia.
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